Business briefs

Thursday

Sep 16, 2010 at 2:08 AM

Stocks September rally stays alive

NEW YORK - Stocks overcame an early slide Wednesday and closed higher as investors tried to keep a September rally alive.

Major indexes had opened lower after a poor reading on factory activity in New York, but turned higher around midday after getting better news on U.S. industrial production. That report showed that the national industrial sector grew for the 12th time 14 months.

Better news on manufacturing was the main trigger behind the rally that began in early September and has now propelled stocks higher on nine out of the past 11 days. The Dow Jones industrial average, which gained 46 points Wednesday, is up 5.6 percent over that time.

In corporate news, MasterCard Inc. rose sharply after saying it expects its income to rise at least 20 percent this year. Shares rose $10.43, or 5.2 percent, to $210.18.

The Dow Jones industrial average rose 46.24, or 0.4 percent, to close at 10,572.73. It was the index's highest close since Aug. 10. The Dow still 5.6 percent below its 2010 high reached on April 26, and up only 1.4 percent for the year to date following steep declines in May and June.

NEW YORK - Chase's online banking service was still having problems for much of Wednesday, extending an outage that has lasted for two days and affected millions of customers.

In the longest outage the bank has experienced, Chase's online service went down around 8pm EST Monday and was down all day Tuesday. Its service for mobile phones was also down, but Chase's network of ATMs and telephone banking services were functioning normally.

Chase, which is the second-largest U.S. bank, said the problem had been fixed early Wednesday. However, people who tried to log in could not get into the site and Chase acknowledged that problems were persisting.

Chase said in a statement that software from a third-party database company corrupted information in its systems and prevented users from logging on. As a result there was a long recovery process, but the bank said that "at no time was customer data at risk." Chase apologized for the inconvenience.

Europe claims ruling as victory

GENEVA - European officials claimed Wednesday that a preliminary decision by the world's top trade court found that aid to U.S. aircraft maker Boeing violated international rules, leading to the prospect that the Chicago-based plane maker may have to forgo or even pay back billions in subsidies.

France's transport and environment ministers said the confidential World Trade Organization ruling delivered to U.S. and EU officials in Geneva "condemns massive subsidies to Boeing that violate WTO rules."

Details of the ruling weren't made public and a final judgment isn't expected to be released for several months.